Superbasic: How do I watch my ripped DVDs on Apple TV

[Jaze]

I have a large collection of DVDs, and divide my time between two cities. I have an Apple TV in each apartment. I've started to rip my DVDs, but what's the best way for me to watch them? I know I can Airplay them to my ATVs, but do most people... add them to iTunes? Somehow transfer them to the ATV on an as-needed basis? Can I plug the external hard drive with my library into the USB port on the ATV?

I'm sure this is a supersimple question, so appreciate your patience.

 

[BODYBUILDERPAUL]

Put them on a hard drive, get a Roku, plug the hard drive into he Roku and use the media browser.

I’ve tried it, so I know it works. But it’s not something I use regularly.
[doublepost=1530448259][/doublepost]Or get Plex. Use remote streaming, or if your internet connection isn’t up to it, cloud sync.

Doesn't make sense to buy a RoKu when the guy already has two Apple TVs. In all fairness, a RoKu is nowhere near as good as the Apple TV - it just can't compete in terms of quality, UI, OS etc. Seems crazy when the Apple TV is simply the best streamer out there by a long shot. It's internal components are of a pro quality, something the Roku is not.

May work out cheaper to buy the films direct from iTunes rather than buy hard drives and NAS drives. I guess 20 favourite HD iTunes films at £5.99 comes in at less than £120.
Also, DVD is going to look pretty nasty on larger TVs now.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Assuming you have a laptop always going back and forth with you or maybe a computer at both destinations...

1. Hook up the hard drive that holds the ripped movies to your computer.
2. Open iTunes.
3. iTunes Preferences.
4. "Advanced" tab.
5. (temporarily) uncheck "Copy Files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library".
6. Open a Finder window on the laptop.
7. Navigate to the folder in which all of these ripped moves are stored.
8. Select all.
9. Drag and drop them into iTunes.
10. As soon as they are there. Reverse step 5 so that any music you rip in the future will be stored on the internal drive.

FYI: Step 5 basically tells iTunes to index the movies AS IF they are stored on the laptop's internal drive while leaving the actual files on the external. If you don't do step 5, you may quickly fill up your laptop's drive with those large movie files. And yes, this means you need to connect the external to the laptop when you want to watch movies stored on it.

Then, when you travel, take the laptop and external hard drive (if you didn't copy the movies to the laptop's internal drive) with you. Hook it up and wifi connect laptop & TV. Enjoy your movies.

Tip: if the laptop's drive is too small to hold them all (and you want them all with you), there are plenty of cheap, small & light-weight portable hard and SSD drives on the market. Pick up one of those to lighten the (external hard drive) load.

If you have a pretty fat SSD in that laptop and don't care about storage space (or you don't really have many DVDs to store), you can just execute 1, 2, 6-9 (this WILL copy them to the laptop's internal drive so be sure you have enough spare space for them).

If you have ANY iTunes-runnable computer (even an old one otherwise retired) at both locations, you can do the above with BOTH computers and then you'll only need to bring along that external (movies) drive with you when you travel. Connect it to the computer at the location where you are, open iTunes and stream your movies. When you head back to the other location, shut things down, disconnect that external drive, take it with you, hook it to the other location's computer, open iTunes and your movies are there (too).

Tip: As you rip new movies to that portable drive, they'll need to be indexed in iTunes too. Follow the same steps except you only need to select the new movies you've added since last time to drag & drop into iTunes.

Tip: Use tools to properly tag and maybe put a movie poster in each movie file so that display nicely in TV. There are many such tools available for tagging ripped movies.

 

[Boyd01]

Now I'm moving onto full length B&W films (sorry, I've started by digitizing my Hitchcock collection) and bumpbed up the resolution to SuperHQ 1080 30, and finding I'm getting a rip of 3GB for a 2 hour movie.

If you are talking about DVD's, they are standard definition 480x720 pixels. It's a big waste of space and ripping time to use SuperHQ 1080 for those files. Use the SuperHQ 480p setting and you will get the best possible quality from that source. But if you do some tests, I think you'll find that you can't usually tell the difference between SuperHQ and one of the lower quality settings.

IIRC, most of my movies (also ripped from DVD) are in the 1.5 to 2gb file size range.

 

[Boyd01]

WOW 700 that's a hell of a lot of stress to put on a computer. And a lot of life's precious time.

I ripped about 1200 DVD's over a period of a couple years. Initially I used my old 2008 MBP since it has an internal DVD drive and isn't used for anything else. But after awhile I realized what a dog Handbrake is with an old Core2Duo machine on MacOSX 10.5.9. So I switched to ripping them on my 2013 i7 MacBook Air. A DVD that took over an hour to rip on the old MBP only took 15 to 20 minutes on the newer computer.

My library is on a 4tb USB 3.0 hard drive connected to a bottom of the line 2014 Mac Mini that runs iTunes 24/7 with homesharing. This works really well with my two Apple TV's, iPad, MacBook Air and iPhone. But I only have one house. You could do something similar with a mac in each city as an iTunes server - can really be any old Mac or even a PC as long as it runs a relatively new version of iTunes.

If you don't want to invest in duplicate equipment, you could use your laptop with an external disk and take it between both cities. If you need to move an iTunes library between machines, see this article, I found it very helpful: http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive/

 

[thisismyusername]

I've been doing this for years. I first started this in 2005 with Windows XP Media Center Edition and have used lots of different solutions over the years (media center, iTunes, MythTV, a custom frontend I wrote about 10 years ago, various other frontends). I now use Plex and Infuse together for my 500'ish movies. Plex server runs on my Linux server in my basement and that's where all my media is stored. The server uses ZFS and I have 24TB setup in a raidz2. I use the Plex docker image and updating the plex server is simply a matter of restarting that docker image.

I use MakeMKV to rip movies. It took me a month or two to rip all the movies when I originally did it many years ago. I'd just rip a few in the morning and a few more at night. I've even heard of people loading up a PC with 5 to 8 DVD drives so they can rip multiple movies at once but that's a little extreme, lol. Just do a few every day and you'll eventually have them all ripped. If hard drive space is an issue, use Handbrake to compress them.

I use the Infuse client only on the AppleTV and when watching movies; it's setup to work against my Plex server (and they both work great together). I use Infuse on the AppleTV mainly so I can take advantage of HD audio (it decodes it to PCM and sends that to my receiver), which Plex doesn't support because AppleTV doesn't support DTA-MA and TrueHD. I also think Infuse has a better UI. The main reasons I still use Plex as a server is so I can centralize the metadata and use multiple different devices, some of which are not Apple devices.

All other devices (iPhone/iPad, web, Roku) use the Plex client and it's setup so I can watch things remotely.

I also have Plex setup to work with my HDHomeRun for live TV and DVR functionality. This it the only thing I use the Plex client for on the AppleTV. I prefer using Plex for live TV so I can pause/rewind/etc (I don't have cable).

Over all, I'm very happy with my setup. It's very stable and I never have any issues. I've been using Plex to do this for about 3 years now and only just recently started using Infuse as well. Those two, either separately or together, are by far the best and easiest ways to serve up movies IMO. I'm so happy with both Plex and Infuse that I happily purchased both of their lifetime subscriptions.

 

[Jaze]

Thank you all - and particularly @HobeSoundDarryl (nice part of the world, btw! I have friends who live there.)

I have something like 700 DVDs, so this is going to be a slow project. Many of them are somewhat obscure or old titles and may not be available via iTunes. Rather than spend thousands more dollars to watch things I already own, I'd rather just watch my own. A minor hit in visual quality is OK with me.

I see what you're saying about indexing my DVDs in iTunes, Darryl, but the part I don't understand is "Hook it up and wifi connect laptop & TV." - do you mean AirPlay them from the laptop to the ATV?

Hmm. I'm suddenly remembering that the ATV home screen has a Computers app/symbol/whatever... Time to do a little exploration.
[doublepost=1530455691][/doublepost]Aha! OK, I see that the computer "app" lets me stream from iTunes to the ATV. I HAVE LEARNED SOMETHING. Although it says I need to turn on Home Sharing to access that feature, and I'm pretty sure I have it on - I mean my Music is all available through the ATV...

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Yes, “computers app” is THE fundamental way from itunes to TV.

As to the long process, rip several at a time, then batch handbrake encode them for TV (even) while you sleep. It WILL take a good while to do 700+,but 7 per day would be only 100 days or 10 per day would take only a little more than 2 months.

If you have a good computer at both destinations, use both to do batches and maybe cut a target time in half?

 

[Tech198]

I have a large collection of DVDs, and divide my time between two cities. I have an Apple TV in each apartment. I've started to rip my DVDs, but what's the best way for me to watch them? I know I can Airplay them to my ATVs, but do most people... add them to iTunes? Somehow transfer them to the ATV on an as-needed basis? Can I plug the external hard drive with my library into the USB port on the ATV?

I'm sure this is a supersimple question, so appreciate your patience.

If in the correct format: .m4v, import them to iTunes & turn on Home Sharing (File >>Home Sharing.) Some .mp4's formats have trouble depends how they were encoded. But usually if they can be played in Quicktime, they'll be able to be imported to iTunes

 

[Boyd01]

I took a peek at that article, and while it looked good, it's 7 years old - at least one iTunes menu photo was out of date. Do you recommend it now in 2018?

I have not reviewed it in depth recently, but think all the principles are still the same (although Apple loves to change the iTunes user interface ).

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

I'm going to try using the technique that @HobeSoundDarryl mentioned above - indexing my movie files in iTunes without adding them physically to the iTunes Media library on my MBA.

That will work. I have about the same number of movies on an external drive, indexed (only) exactly as described. While I don't travel between 2 locations, I am CERTAIN that would work fine for you. And, all things considered, it seems like the smallest "load" to be hauling back & forth, especially if you have an iTunes-capable computer on both ends or are carting a laptop back & forth too.

Let's round up to 800 DVD movies ripped. That's about 800 times about 4GB (max, many DVD movies will compress at less than 4GB) each = 2.8TB. 4TB very light, very portable drives are less than $100. For example: WD Passport 4TB is $99.99 from B&H as I write this. About 1/2 LB and 4.3" X 3.2" X 0.8". 4TB would leave a LOT of room for other files and/or to grow the collection beyond the 700+ DVDs.

One more suggestion: BE SURE to have at least one backup of the collection. Lose that portable somewhere in the journeys, drop it (and damage it), etc and a backup will save you from starting the rip & HB process over from scratch. Possible option: buy TWO of those portable drives and rotate them as you travel: Take latest, up-to-date "A" drive to the location with "B" drive, update "B" to match "A", bring "B" back to the first location when you return. Repeat with "B" as the now most up-to-date drive.

 

[Boyd01]

Surely these portable spinning hard drives fail after 2 or 3 years. What happens then to all of those back ups?

Of course drives fail, that's why you need a good backup strategy for your important data. I have all my media on a cheap 4tb USB 3.0 hard drive. I also have two additional hard drives that I rotate for backups. Late every night, carbon copy mounts the backup disk, clones the media disk to it, then dismounts it. My primary media drive died after 3 years. I just replaced it with the clone, rebooted and was up and running again within under 5 minutes.

I have backblaze for two other computers, and will probably add my iTunes server for another layer of protection. If all my backups fail.... I still have my 1200 original DVD's in a floor to ceiling bookcase that I built. Can't quite bring myself to moving the disks to boxes up in the attic, although I have not watched a physical DVD since 2012.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

BBP: Of course it works. And guess what is supporting your one and only "everyone should do it my way" iCloud: spinning hard drives all packed together in hot raid devices.

Anyone that is not you can back up files from one to another (to another still if you like) just like saving one file to any kind of device or iCloud.

But sure, it's much better for the guy to just re-buy stuff he already owns again because the one and only way you tout in every single thread is the TV + stream-from-iTunes way. OP has ALREADY said he doesn't want to buy the same stuff again... that he'd rather go through the trouble of ripping movies he ALREADY owns to get almost every benefit you tout without having to give more money to Apple and the Studio to buy the same stuff again. PLUS, OP has already shared that he has a number of movies NOT available via iTunes.

And if OP doesn't want to risk it with portable spinning drives, he could spend much more for solid state SSD versions. But again, your one and only way for everyone is depending on spinning hard drives packed into RAID servers probably operating in oppressive heat right this minute.

A typical spinning hard drive lasts for many years with no issues (for this kind of non-daily, non-continuous R/W use, I've got drives still functional after 8 years). If a person is smart enough to back up to at least ONE other drive, it doesn't matter if, after those many years pass, one of the drives conks: the backup is there with all of their data, they buy a new "backup" drive and duplicate to it and they are immediately able to access their media and are freshly backed up to cover the old backup drive conking at some other point.

And if all of your thinking is about "investments", renting access to any data via a for-profit cloud where you have to trust strangers as caretakers of (not) your videos is a terrible "investment." A consumer doesn't buy a hard drive to be an investment.

 

[cobracnvt]

That's quite an investment, both time and money.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

New suggestions: HB at native (DVD) quality and native frame rates and let your respective TVs do the upscaling. You aren't actually creating real HD versions by choosing resolutions greater than DVD. You're simply asking HB to do the "making up" of pixels instead of letting your TV's probably better upscaler do it. Generally, the goal in this situation should be to create as near to a perfect copy at the native resolution as possible. Then, let the TVs dynamically fit them to a screen resolution. Ideally, this results in much smaller files that look about the same as playing them right off of the DVDs themselves.

And again, HB can do these in batches. So you can rip 5-10+ and then set up HB to do them one after another while you sleep or are at work or traveling. Most of mine were converted while I slept. Instead of 3 per day, you could do many more that way and get the whole project done sooner. Your computer won't care- give it plenty of work to do rather than having it sit idle much of the time.

And yes, many DVDs are going to compress their movies via HB down to 2GB or smaller. All 700+ might ultimately be able to fit on that 2TB or you can always buy another when it is nearly full. They'll likely be even cheaper then.

 

[HDFan]

And again, HB can do these in batches. So you can rip 5-10+ and then set up HB to do them one after another while you sleep or are at work or traveling. Most of mine were converted while I slept. Instead of 3 per day, you could do many more that way and get the whole project done sooner. Your computer won't care- give it plenty of work to do rather than having it sit idle much of the time.

If you separate the ripping from the encoding as HobeSoundDarryl mentions you can speed things up. Your optical drive ripping can be a real time or partial real time option depending on drive speed. If your computer is relatively fast then it is limited by the optical drive speed, not the encoding speed. The optical drive read rate is the limitation. You want to push the drives and your computer cpu(s) to 100% of capacity.

When you are at your computer just rip the disks. If you have the option of running multiple optical drives run several rips at the same time. If you get, say, 4 drives then you can go through those 500 disks in not that long a time. As you complete the rips put the ripped ISOs into Handbrake and start the encoding. So while you're at the computer ripping from the disks, Handbrake will be encoding from the ISO disk images at its maximum throughput. When you go to bed the Handbrake queue will still be there and will continue encoding through the night.

 

[archer75]

Use plex. It will make your content available on everything. Phones, devices, TV's, etc. It can share outside the home as well to yourself, family and friends. I have well over 1000 rips and server it all up via plex.

 

[d5aqoëp]

No one suggested an excellent PAID app called Infuse on Apple TV to playback his rips?

The app is paid but the UI is awesome. Beats Apple even.

 

[archer75]

So to recoup I can use Plex [Server] on the PC (media source) and play back to Apple TV using Plex app on either the Apple TV or iPhone for zero cost?

Yes. As well as just about any other device/tv out there.

 

[archer75]

So your television milestones are when black and white was replaced by color in the 60s, and the introduction of HDR in the 2010s? No other significant changes in the subsequent 50 years, including the 1080p and 4K transitions?

HDR is a game changer. Way more significant than 4K. But I would say 1080p was as well.

 

[Jethro!]

Or... If you want to watch your DVD's you could just, you know, pop them in your DVD player and watch them.

 

[HDFan]

As I understand what you experienced if I were to use my newer 2012 MBP i7 (with SSD and 16GB memory) - the ripping process would go faster.

Maybe not. If you are ripping from a DVD the bottle neck is normally the DVD drive transfer rate. Check your cpu activity during the RIP. If you have spare CPU cycles then a faster machine will likely not make a difference.

I do not know how to "point" my iTunes program to an external hard drive

Very simple to keep your iTunes library on an external disk. iTunes/Preferences/Advanced/iTunes Media folder location.

 

[LCC0256]

Maybe not. If you are ripping from a DVD the bottle neck is normally the DVD drive transfer rate. Check your cpu activity during the RIP. If you have spare CPU cycles then a faster machine will likely not make a difference.



Very simple to keep your iTunes library on an external disk. iTunes/Preferences/Advanced/iTunes Media folder location.

Thank you for your help
[doublepost=1532194131][/doublepost]

Your rip times are comparable to mine, the one hour example I gave was a for a one hour black and white TV show. I wondered if the CD drive was the bottleneck (I was using the internal drive on the 2008 MBP) so I got a fast external DVD drive (a big ugly monster). Didn't make any difference.

Out of 1200 commercial DVD's, I only had a handful that wouldn't rip - less than 20. I tried MacX DVD and another program and they couldn't do the problem DVD's either. Finally, I just purchased the few of these that I actually wanted from iTunes. Anyway, I saw no reason why I should switch from Handbrake - it works really well and it's free. Now this might have to do with the type of DVD's you're ripping, very few of mine were recent "blockbuster" movies.

Try ripping a couple on your 2012 MBP - I think you will find a big speed difference. I connected my machines with ethernet and used filesharing to transfer the ripped movies - easy. I don't use USB 2.0 disks anymore, they are just too slow for me.

See the link to the article in my post that you quoted. It will tell you everything you need to know about putting your library on an external drive or moving it to another machine. If you use an external drive, I strongly suggest that you move the iTunes database to that drive as well as your media - this is covered in that article. Otherwise, the database will be stored on the internal drive on the computer. Problem is, if you happen to start iTunes and the external drive is not available, your database can get corrupted. This is a real mess - happened to me and was a pain to fix.

Thank you for your help. I find hand brake cumbersome and just another piece of software to figure out (I am getting a little long in the tooth so I have to pick and choose the now limited amount my brain can take in!!) so I will stay with the Mac X DVD since it has worked so far. All my equipment is capable of being connected to each other via ethernet cable. My 08 machine only has USB 2.0 so that is why I got that 2.0 back up drive for it. I have never used file sharing and am not sure how to do it. I assume it is quicker than moving my movies from iTunes on the 2012 MBP to thumb drive then placing the thumb drive in the 2008 MBP and copying back on that iTunes library?? maybe simpler once I understand how to do it?
By the way it was a little faster to rip the movies on the 2012 MBP. The movies I am ripping are not blockbuster recents - they are primarily Disney classics and other what I consider classic movies. (Lawrence of Arabia Dr Zhivago Shane Bad Day at Black Rock Casablanca Ben Hur Elmer Gantry etc) but still copy protected.
I too have made the choice not to buy any more DVDs or blue rays etc. Once I get this project done I will have all my home movies and all the ones I like to watch over again on my computer on a back up and hopefully in the cloud. Although that begs the last question - does iCloud also store these ripped movies (both the copy protected and the home movies I have ripped?) Thank you again for taking time to help me. Larry

 

[Boyd01]

I have never used file sharing and am not sure how to do it. I assume it is quicker than moving my movies from iTunes on the 2012 MBP to thumb drive then placing the thumb drive in the 2008 MBP and copying back on that iTunes library??

Yes, much easier than that! Should also be considerably faster than a USB 2.0 thumb drive. Very simple to set up file sharing, see this:

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-file-sharing-mh17131/mac

If you look in the media folder (at the root of your iTunes library) there should be a folder named "automatically add to iTunes". Just drag the ripped movies to that folder using file sharing and they'll be added to your library.

The other handy MacOS feature is screen sharing, I use that quite a bit:

https://support.apple.com/kb/ph25554?locale=en_US

 

[RecentlyConverted]

My problem with ripping DVDs was getting subtitles for films where the characters start speaking a foreign language. I tried different ways, but IT got frustrating, so I gave up (websites often had subtitles that didn’t match up to the characters).

Shame there isa’t a ripping software That rips DVDs and can collect forced subtitles. I select it on MacX DVD ripper Pro, but I never get any subtitles to appear on my ATV!